Interesting military trivia: the aircraft carrier has supplanted the battleship in terms of usefulness and importance. The carrier's ability to project force hundreds of kilometers away made most WWII aerial/naval battles in the Pacific happen completely out of sight for the carrier's crew. Missile technology itself and remote piloting may do this to the carrier as well, but the current status quo — and an author's potential setting — are maintained by electronic countermeasures to disrupt missile guidance, accuratepoint defenses, and electronic warfare potentially compromising the effectiveness of remotely piloted (or automated) craft. Currently, major warships that aren't carriers or amphibious assault ships are missile ships, each capable of launching a relative Macross Missile Massacre, so the other side better hope it isn't Point Defenseless.

In space, however, the standard top-of-the-line ship is a hybrid carrier/battleship. It has the heavy armor and big guns of a battleship, along with the fighters and point defense weapons of a carrier. This makes perfect sense, assuming carrying fighters in space makes sense, because:

Often part of a Standard Sci-Fi Fleet. Naturally comes hand-in-hand with the Space Fighter; given that strikecraft are an important part of a Battlestar, see also their Analysis page for some arguments on their use or lack thereof, which may have knock-on effects on the feasibility of Battlestars.

As a general rule, the Battlestar is portrayed in one of two ways:

Type 1: Battleship carrying fighters. This is essentially a capital ship with the primary offensive options being its own big guns, with the fighters to complement the defenses or to provide additional strike options. Space Battleship Yamato is a textbook example of this, as are Imperial Star Destroyers.

Type 2: Carrier with extra guns and armor. This ship essentially behaves like a real life aircraft carrier, in that the primary offensive option is its embarked fighter wing, and the guns and armor lean more towards self defense options. The Battlestar Galactica and TCS Tiger Claw are excellent examples of this.

Tends to be rare in video games due to Competitive Balance that somehow requires carriers and transports to be unarmed.

In Real Life wet navies, it does not work. Battleships and carriers require very different paradigms; the former are built for taking and dealing out heavy damage, which demands certain armor and armament characteristics, such as compartmentalization to minimize damage spread but also cut into holding space. Fighter landing strips, hangars and the stores for their fuel and munitions would detract from this role, leaving you with a Master of None that cannot fight or tank as well as a pure combatant or service as many fighters as a pure carrier. This didn't stop some attempts from being made. When initially launched in the late 1920s, the USS Lexington and Saratoga had a complement of cruiser-class 8-inch guns. Japan created hybrid Battleship/seaplane carriers out of a couple of old battleships, Ise and Hyuga in the wake of losses at Midway. The naysayers turned out to be right: Ise and Hyuga were total failures, and the large guns on the US ships interfered with flight operations if actually used, and they were removed in 1941. Other experiments never got even this far.

In space, however, this model is less silly than it might appear. A trio of points: First, given how planets move through space and the need for at least rudimentary slingshot orbits, trajectories are actually fairly predictable in time and space, therefore, combat is likely to be very short range, though you could send a bunch of missiles hurtling down this space "lane". Although fightercraft are less useful in a traditional role, they can bring weapons (e.g. missiles) closer, in under the target's point-defense range, and at this point in time we can't conceive of a spacecraft that could take a missile and keep fighting, but if we could take the missile out early, the most it could do could be irradiate the ship, and you can armor against that. You can actually make an argument for almost any weapon in space, though for kinetics you'd need a propellant that doesn't need outside air, and be willing to live with the fact that you're putting hyper-lethal debris somewhere, especially immediate if you're fighting in near-orbit. Thirdly, Deflector Shields could help mitigate some of the carrier's vulnerabilities, especially if physical Armor Is Useless such that battleships don't have superior durability after all.

Furthermore, depending on the Faster-Than-Light Travel system, the carrier strike group system used in Real Life may not work. In Real Life, enemy ships have to battle through fighter screens and escorts to get to the lightly-armored carrier. However, in a universe where the FTL has a lack of No Warping Zone, enemy battleships could bypass screening elements to "jump" into close quarters combat and shred carriers with alpha strikes, denying your side most of its strikecraft and thus offensive power, insofar as this is a universe where fighters have useful anti-capital firepower. In such a universe, it would only make sense to armor and upgun carriers to survive these sorts of lightning strikes, thus giving rise to the battlestar concept.

Also more obviously the Lexington-class battleship carriers in the Comet empire series, which had two battleship turrets in front, and a carrier deck in the back.

The Lexington-class ships are based on the IJS Ise and Hyuga; see the Real Life section in the description.

Even further borne out by the fact that the American Lexington-class of carriers from World War II were originally built to be battlecruisers.

In the Rainbow Galaxy battle, the Gamilons had a battleship/carrier that had a runway deck that flipped over to reveal laser cannon turrets.

Subverted in Legend of Galactic Heroes. While carrier-type ships do have cannons for ship-to-ship combat, they are not primary fighting units and use cannons mostly in self-defense and to protect fighters docking for resupplying. Ship-to-ship combat is mostly handled by dedicated battleships, of which the command ships are the most powerful (including Yang Wen-li's Hyperion and Reinhard von Lohengramm's Brunhild).

There are, many, many examples in Gundam, starting with the original Mobile Suit Gundam and its White Base. Basically, any Cool Ship in the saga has to be a carrier to launch titular Humongous Mecha (and normal fighters) but, depending on the series, can have more or less firepower to make it a battleship. Most recent Cool Ship from Gundam 00 is clearly more of a carrier since it can barely defend itself without Gundams. However, both Archangel from Gundam SEED and Minerva from Gundam SEED Destiny pack a serious punch, complete with integrated Wave Motion Guns.

It should be noted, however that in most Gundam series, these types of ship are usually limited to very short production runs. The original series's Pegasus class had less than ten ships of the line. In later series, we see the carrier elements becoming more prominent in ship design. Only two ships were built of Gundam SEED's Archangel class.

Also notable is the fact that The Federation from the original series followed the traditional "you can only have one or the other" mentality, with older ships even being forced to carry Humongous Mechastrapped to their hulls when the latter were introduced. This was the primary reason they came so close to being trounced by Zeon early in the series.

At any rate, considering that MS are giant humanoids, it might be better to think of the carriers as enormous APC-type vehicles rather than aircraft carriers.

The Chouginga Dai-Gurren used to be the fucking Moon, and did its job for a while before towing the original Moon back into orbit. It could also become an humanoid mecha that could shoot at all points of space and time. Simultaneously.

SDF Macross. Especially later versions like Battle Frontier, which had all sorts of cannons and CIWS mounts as well as its Wave Motion Gun.

Well, the SDF-1 even had a entire city in it! Since later ships of the line escort dedicated colony ships, though, they obviously have the room for even more/bigger guns.

The original SDF-1 Macross actually had MORE guns on it than the later New Macross-class ships such as Battle Frontier. It's just the animation budget wasn't up to showing them traverse and fire like they do in the newer shows so they end up being largely static decorations. Those four massive railguns on the docking assembly (the 'shoulder' in battle mode) are never once shown firing, for instance.

The original SDF-1 Macross had more guns than earlier New Macross class ships such as Battle 7. The redesign of the class shown by Battle 25 (AKA: Battle Frontier) has restored the myriad smaller cannons and point-defense guns that marked the previous Macross class Super-Dimensional Fortresses.

The Emperor Machines from Getter Robo, three ships that can combine into a giant robot and are made from Mars and the dinosaurs. Really.

The Estanatreich from Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko not only functions as this, it has an entire colony on its back. Justified as it is the one and only de facto territory of TERRA faction. Other ships exist as well, particularly the NESS carrierships.

The Exelion and Eltreum from Gunbuster are like this. Apart from the titular mecha, the former was equipped with a whole array of long-range lasers as well as a legion of MachineWeapons for self-defense. The latter went even beyond that in all kinds of ways.

Heroic Age's Argonaut is a massive ship carrying numerous fighter and Humongous Mecha units, bristling with guns, and outfitted with entire orchards and other facilities to allow for it to support a rather large crew effectively indefinitely. Oh, and it can also turn into an enormous Wave Motion Gun aptly named the "Star Blaster".

The Nirvana in Vandread relies mainly on the Dread fighters and the titular Combining Mecha for its offense. At least until Bart figured out how to work the guns...

The Arcadia from Captain Harlock carries a fair-sized fighter complement. In fact, it sometimes looks like at least half of her forty-one-man crew is out there.

The Prequels bring us the Acclamator-class and Venator-class vessels, which serve as army transports and spacecraft carriers respectively. Acclamators also end up as being used as floating carriers as well. Venators actually have a lot more fighter capacity than the bigger Imperial Star Destroyers and even the Super Star Destroyers (though that was later retconned to state that Super Star Destroyers can carry a lot more fighters, but it would be easier to load those fighters in the escort fleet that always accompanies it, and if necessary, be a mothership for those.

Alternately, the fighters do something VERY clever. (But said cleverness, as shown, isn't really user-friendly.)

This was how naval aircraft worked in WWII, dedicated fighters (F4F Wildcat, F6F Hellcat, A6M Zero) escorting or shooting down dedicated bombers and torpedo planes. Modern naval aircraft are dominated by space- and cost-effective hybrid "fighter-bombers""strike fighters" like the F-18.

The Death Star also qualifies: it has FTL propulsion, carries countless smaller fighter craft, has surface-mounted turbolasers for enemy fighters that get too close (although the first DS's turbolasers are ineffective at this), and the superlaser itself can take out large craft, as shown in Return of the Jedi. And, you know, planets.

Hell, take a look at this concept art◊ for the Death Star. Yes, that is a dry-dock for Star Destroyers.

The TCS Tiger Claw in the film version of Wing Commander can launch wings of fighters and several boarding shuttles. When entering battle, though, after the fighters launch, the ship closes and engages Deflector Shields. However, the only weapons the Tiger Claw has appears to have are anti-ship torpedoes (completely Point Defenseless). The Kilrathi have some sort of energy bolts as well as torps.

The Project Insight Helicarriers in Captain America: The Winter Soldier while atmospheric, are this as opposed to merely airborne aircraft carriers, as they also mount an impressive amount of guns intended to be the primary offensive measure. They're a Type 1 depiction, despite appearing to be a Type 2 example.

Literature

A staple in the Perry Rhodan universe from the beginning, with large capital ships inevitably carrying their complement of fighters and larger small craft (often up to nominal "light cruiser" size themselves) in addition to heavy weapons of their own. Said secondary crafts' actual combat effectiveness in any area where the big ships are busy engaging each other seems to be mainly subject to the needs of the plot — sometimes they're a genuine threat in and of themselves, sometimes the larger unit's commander refuses to even let them launch because of the risk.

C. J. Cherryh's warships in her Alliance/Union 'verse do this in some cases, especially the Earth Company Fleet, whose main ships are "carriers", each of which has four "riders", smaller craft without FTL capability. They're not super-small, though, having a flight crew of four and the ability to carry some degree of cargo and passengers. They are atmosphere-capable, high-performance, and armed with powerful missiles and guns in combat. One book, Hellburner, covers events during the testing phase of these craft. The carriers themselves are heavily armed with guns and missiles, and do not rely on the riders for defense. Her earlier-written but much later in chronology Faded Sun trilogy features a carrier that has a single, much larger rider, which is not atmosphere-capable but is effectively an in-system cruiser.

Honor Harrington has the Minotaur class of LAC carrier ships, and their successors. Although not intended to get directly involved in combat, the CLACs do carry some of the more traditional naval weapons in an acknowledgment of Finagle's Law.

The Grayson Space Navy's version of the Minotaur, the Covington class, is an aversion, however. The GSN felt that a CLAC's odds of survival standing directly in the wall of battle were low enough that they chose to arm the Covingtons only with countermeasures and point-defence clusters, making them entirely dependent on their embarked LAC complement for offensive striking power, much like most Real Life aircraft carriers.

Prior to the creation of the CLACs, there are the Q-ships sent to the Silesian Confederacy under Honor's command. In fact, these new Q-ships not only carry dreadnought-level weapons but can also launch up to 12 LACs. For bonus, points, the Q-ships can also launch missile pods (previously, they were always dragged into battle with TractorBeams). So not only can the Q-ships be considered prototype CLACs but also prototype podnaughts.

In Andrey Livadny's The History of the Galaxy series, most large human ships are Battlestars, able to launch at least some number of fighters. Smaller ships, including dedicated missile frigates are unable to do that, fulfilling more specialized roles. While there are no dedicated carrier ships (probably because the writer is Russian and is, therefore, influenced by Russian naval mentality). The largest (and most powerful) human ships are the flagship cruisers, able to launch dozens of fighters, as well as being armed to the teeth (missiles, plasma throwers, lasers, mass drivers). The defenses include point-defense systems, EM shielding against energy weapons, thick armor, and anti-boarding shield generators.

And yes, the author is a bit off on the issues of size, crew, and the number of fighters. The ships are often ridiculously large (topping off at around 7 kilometers in length for flagship cruisers), with ridiculously small crews (justified with the ubiquitous use of Instant A.I., Just Add Water; in fact, ships can be fully automated) and much smaller number of fighters than you would expect for a ship this size. Slightly justified with flagship cruisers, which feature an anti-matter emitter which takes up a fifth of the ship. This is particularly egregious on the author's website, where he lists ship stats. The standard crew size for a cruiser is around 100, although one novel mentions a heavy cruiser with 2000 people on board (still low, but better).

Later novels mention a change in the Confederacy of Suns military docrine with the introduction of a new class of FTL-capable modular fighters for defending Periphery systems. A new class of carrying cruisers (Russian writers, as a rule, hate the word "carrier"), which will act as mobile bases for rapid reaction squadrons without the cruisers themselves engaging in battle.

Although it doesn't start out with them, the Beijing in Lacuna receives a small fighter wing by the middle of the book.

The titular Merrimack from the Tour of the Merrimack. It is armed with missile launchers, beam cannons, and projectile barrels, and carries several flights of Marine Swifts.

Unusually averted in the granddaddy of all technoporn space operas, Lensman. With the exception of some heavy cruisers and very fast scouts, virtually everything is a capital ship. There are no 'fighters' or light bombing craft at all.

Troy Rising's titular battlestation and its fellows, when fully armed and operational, not only have enormous quantities of missiles and lasers available to them, but also can hold within them an entire fleet of escort vessels, assault shuttles, and extensive support facilities like entire fabbers to repair battle damage and create more equipment, including missiles and escorting warshipsnote the stations are also serving as Earth's shipyards, as being much easier to defend than shipyards in orbit around a world.

Late in the Sten series, there's a newly built "battle cruiser" named Victory — which also carries a flotilla of twelve tacships (roughly equivalent to PT boats). Sten is dubious about this: he likes tacships, but carrying them makes the Victory vulnerable — lots of stuff that'll blow up; not enough space dedicated to armor to keep that stuff from blowing up; and having hangars at the rear of the ship interferes with placing sensors and weapons back there.

Sten had experience with tools, vehicles, and ships that were ostensibly dual- or multiple-purpose. Almost without exception that meant that the tool did quite a number of things badly, and nothing well.

In the Legends of Dune prequel trilogy, the Ballista-class battleships are the main warships used by the League Armada. Besides formidable weaponry, they carry 20 troop transports, 15 shuttles, 50 patrol craft, and 200 KindjalSpace Fighters. Each one also has a crew of 1500. They are later equipped with Deflector Shields and Holtzmann drives in addition to their pre-fold FTL drives. Even then, many are still destroyed during the Robot War. After the defeat of Omnius, it can be assumed the Ballistae were retired.

About 80 years after the end of the Butlerian Jihad, 200 of these are given by a weak-willed Emperor to appease Manford Torondo, the leader of the anti-technological Butlerians. About half of these are destroyed during a space battle with Venport Holdings forces, not that Torondo cares about casualties. It's noted that, being 80-year-old mothballed relics, they are inferior to latest warships used by Venhold (just 20 Venhold ships are able to inflict massive damage to the Butlerian fleet) and, likely, the Emperor.

Animorphs had the Blade Ship of Visser Three, which carried a flotilla of Bug Fighters, and probably plenty of Dracon cannons, and the Andalite dome ships, which possibly doubled as The Mother Ship. They could split in two so that the front half could become the fighter ship, while the back contained crew living quarters in a dome.

In Dread Empire's Fall, there's essentially one kind of ship, and the only differences are the crew (max G's they can pull) and the number of missiles they have and the number of launchers they have for them. Apparently even the largest ships only need a single missile to gut them. That said, missiles are used to counter missiles in this setting, so more launchers can be more safety. All of these ships carry a crapton of missiles (but there are notable levels of "crapton"), defense lasers of various kinds, and small crafts called "pinnaces". A pinnace is meant to travel a safe distance behind the missiles and update their trajectories - the mothership cannot make tactical decisions from a light-minute away, after all! Those pinnace pilots have a notably low survival rate in combat, though a few have absurdly high kill-counts, mostly from single engagements. There is no dogfighting of any sort, because inertia in space. In a given battle, by the time the two sides have closed with each other, usually one or both sides are left with only destroyed, irradiated husks. In one battle in a gravity well, where the two factions made very close passes at each other, it was horribly messy and casualties were staggering.

CSS Invincible in the Flight Engineer trilogy is a prototype pocket carrier intended to be a Lightning Bruiser in comparison to the larger fleet carriers. Her primary armament is her fighter complement, but she's hardly lacking in other weapons and is very fast.

The TC/USNA America in the Star Carrier series is primarily used as a carrier with several ways of launching its grav-fighters (a single fighter is potentially capable of taking down several capital ships). When not launching fighters out of its spinal magnetic accelerators, those can be used to launch kinetic kill slugs instead. While they don't pack as much a punch as dedicated railgun battleships, the America can still pack quite a punch. Given the distances involved in space combat and the lack of FTL communication or sensors means that firing unguided munitions at a ship several light minutes away is useless, as your sensor data is that many minutes old. Standard tactics involve for the carrier dropping out of meta-space to launch fighters immediately for a near-c strike prior to the arrival of the (much slower) main fleet to the enemy. With any luck, the enemy will detect the arrival of the fleet only seconds before the near-c strike.

The nature of the grav-fighter propulsion (singularity projection) means that, for the most part, they really can maneuver like a jet fighter in air. Even better, in fact, as gravity forces acting on the fighter and the pilot are largely uniform, meaning a fighter can perform a tight turn at several hundred G-forces and not even feel it by projecting a singularity to the side and slingshotting around it.

The Ark Royal is a supercarrier from an era when the predominant battle doctrine was that carriers should be able to hold their own on the front line. Thus, it's heavily armored and armed with powerful mass drivers and nuclear missiles in addition to launching fighters. Modern carriers are more specialized.

Live-Action TV

The eponymous ships (as well as the one ship whose name is in the title) of the original series Battlestar Galactica. No doubt the series, and its eponymous ships are the Trope Maker and Trope Codifier. Virtually every similar ship to come after in other fiction was inspired by some degree by the original Galactica and her fellow Battlestars.

The Cylon Basestars from the new Battlestar Galactica are a subversion. Although they're not dedicated missile/fighter carriers, they tend much more towards carriers than battleships, being thin-skinned and reliant on standoff missiles and Raiders to do damage. In terms of sheer firepower and survivability in a ship-to-ship engagement, Battlestars are consistently depicted as superior, with even the obsolete Galactica being able to outfight them, although this may just be a result of the Rule of Cool limiting the useful range of a Basestar's missiles.

Differing design philosophies. The Cylons had the initiative in both wars, plus had the advantage of having no fixed home to defend. As a result, the Basestar is a purely offensive platform, designed to support the raiders that are its primary weapons — much like an aircraft carrier. The Colonials, by comparison, were almost always on the back foot, and DID have homes to defend. The Battlestar is as much, if not more, geared towards defense as offense — hence the massive volume of armor and point defense systems, reflecting the fact that it might have to hold its ground and absorb everything thrown at it, in order to shield its protectees. The role Galactica played at Ragnar — throwing up a near-impenetrable barrier between the Cylons and the fleet — can probably be regarded as the exact job it was designed for.

Cylon raiders are FTL-capable, so Basestars can lurk well behind the front lines, and just jump to a new rendezvous point if they are threatened. Battlestars have to go right to the front, and stay there, in order to support their STL Vipers. This leaves them vulnerable, since FTL allows an enemy to launch a point-blank range attack without warning. Consequently, Battlestars have to have armor and lots of point defenses, and have the ability to fight back in the event that its Vipers are otherwise engaged.

The novel The Cylons' Secret gives the following explanation: Because of Cylons overtaking computers, fighters had to be piloted by humans, but there were not enough pilots to match the numbers of Cylons. Thus the battlestar was born, which could assist fighters with its firepower. The tactics was for Vipers to provide cover against Raiders until the battlestar got in close range with the basestar, which could then be obliterated in a short-range slugging match.

Most ships in Babylon 5 have at least some fighter complement, and all uses beam weapons. In general, the fighters primarily attack other fighters, and get in damage on the capital warships where they can to make it easier for the bigger ships to win the fight, as fighter weaponry really isn't powerful enough to outright kill capital warships on their own.

The Excalibur in Crusade implements a new design that reduces the ship's vulnerability. This is especially evident with the Omega-class destroyers, whose hangar is at the front of the ship, giving the enemy a clear shot at the vulnerable innards. The Excalibur launches fighters by extending a crane of sorts that has StarFuries attached to it. The ship also has the hangar at the front, but it is normally closed during battle, only opening to receive the fighters after the end of the fight.

For the Tau'ri, the X-303 Prometheus, first of the line, and the the BC-304 class, like the Daedalus and Odyssey, carry a contingent of F-302 fighters.

The Ancients' City Ships (i.e.:Atlantis) also qualify with their Gateships/Puddle Jumpers. Interestingly, their Aurora-class battleships don't fit this trope, as they don't carry Puddle Jumpers. However, given that their primary weapons are swarms of guided drones, this makes sense.

Replicator ships go whole hog on this as they are made entirely of Replicators, as are all weapons they use — so their missiles are basically fighters.

The Ori Warships also carry small fighters.

Of the frequently seen ships, the only ones that do not seem to follow the trope are the Asgard ships. (That's probably got something to do with the fact that the Asgard don't have the manpower for combat pilots.)

The Naka'i, also from SG-U, have ships that fall into this trope. Their big blocky destroyers appear to be capable of launching fighter craft that swarm and overwhelm enemy ships with their sheer numbers rather than out-and-out firepower.

The Berserk Drone command ships also carry (and control) a bunch of drones.

The title ship from Andromeda. While the slipfighters (you can guess by the name that they're FTL-capable) are designed to be piloted by living beings, there's nothing stopping them from being piloted remotely using VR goggles, as Tyr often does in the first season. Of course, when you send a single slipfighter to hold off dozens of enemy fighters, you're probably better off being inside Andromeda's thick armor than in a flimsy fighter cockpit. This has more to do with the fact that the Andromeda, for most of the series, is operating with a crew that doesn't even qualify as a "skeleton crew". Though since there's no Subspace Ansible in the series fighters need to stick close to the Andromeda while under remote control, and combat usually takes place at distances of several light-minutes.

Largely avoided in Star Trek. While many ships carry a small contingent of shuttlecraft which are the same size as small fighters, there are few ships that even resemble dedicated battlecarriers. Those few include the Scimitar in Star Trek: Nemesis, the Akira-Class, and the non-existent "Warship Voyager". Some ships that are called fighters are more akin to corvettes. (The shuttlecraft themselves often became Forgotten Phlebotinum)

The lack of "space fighters" in Star Trek is mainly due to production costs and the laws of physics. In TOS, it was hard enough to afford the SFX for phasers, photon torpedoes, and a single shuttlecraft. In the movies, the reason was science advisor (and NASA engineer) Jesco von Puttkamer, who pointed out that physics doesn't allow fighters to maneuver in vacuum the way they do in atmosphere, never mind That Other Sci-Fi Movie Franchise over at 20th Century-Fox. To put it simply, anything a "space fighter" can do in an actual space battle, a guided missile can probably do better, not to mention cheaper. (It doesn't need a pilot, it can be stored in a magazine, and you don't have to worry about recovering it after you've used it.) Starships in ST, TV or movies, are basically the space-going equivalent of modern guided-missile cruisers, like the U.S. Ticonderoga class or the Russian Kirov class. Their job is to use long-range, precision-guided missiles (the photon torpedoes) to achieve "stand-off kills". Their phaser banks are technically secondary weapons, roughly equivalent to the cruisers' 5" (or in the Kirov's case, 100mm) turret guns, or their rapid-fire Close-In Weapon Systems for defense against the other side's anti-ship missiles. (It's interesting that only the Star Fleet Battles game ever picked up on this point.) The fact that they tend to end up in point-blank phaser duels more often than not is mainly due to Rule of Cool plus, frankly, writers who Did Not Read The Manual. (Yes, the Writer's Guide for The Original Series explains all this.)

The new Star Trek movies do pick up on this, however. The scene at the beginning with the Kelvin and the Narada shows the use of phaser turrets to act as a point-defense weapon. Torpedos are the main artillery for both the Kelvin and the Enterprise.

The Alliance "city-cruisers" in Firefly appear to be these, carrying a large number of "gunship" fighters and also some heavy energy weapons. In Serenity, we also encounter another, fairly Standard Sci-Fi Fleet.

In Farscape the Peacekeeper Command Carriers belong in this category, being armed with batteries of anti-ship Frag Cannons and possessing a large complement of Prowler fighters and Marauder troop transports.

The mini-series Peacekeeper Wars starts with a Space Battle showing two Standard Sci Fi Fleets clash, sparking off the Peacekeeper-Scarran conflict, which has been brewing for years.

Tabletop Games

Traveller had several "carrier" starships with spinal mount weapons and fighters or gunboat/corvette-style "Battle Riders". This was also true of the Tigress-class dreadnought, and indeed most Imperial cruisers and battleships.

Then there is of course the Eldar Craftworlds which are planetoid-sized Battlestars capable of launching fleets of "ordinary" Battlestars.

Since fighter-sized vessels (not frigates) in WH40K are often not FTL-capable, they are usually launched from a nearby carrier, some of which are quite heavily armed. Also, "stand alone" battlegroups such as Space Marine Battle Barges carry their own squadrons of fighters.

In Battlefleet Gothic game waves of bombers are powerful enough to destroy a battleship. Hence fighters are required to counter the bombers.

Indeed. However, the biggest carrier, the Emperor class, is still technically a battleship, and carries only marginally less weapon batteries (total; it can actually concentrate more firepower to one side due to most of it being carried in dorsal turrets) than the Retribution class, which is a dedicated "ship of the line". The difference is mostly the Emperor's lack of lances.

It should also be noted that many WH40K races are extremely keen on boarding actions and battleships can carry varying number of boarding pods to launch at enemies.

Also worth noting: vessels that in most other sci-fi universes are referred to as massive, huge, behemoth and such? At a 'mere' kilometer or two in length, they're roughly equivalent to 40K's tiny, single hit point frigates and destroyers. Anything truly deserving of the battlestar title in 40K (cruisers, heavy cruisers, battlecruisers, grand cruisers and battleships) is typically at least a good 10+ kilometers long and much more massive relative to its length than almost anything else in space.

BattleTech has its WarShips. Where plain old JumpShips are essentially immobile and unarmed targets only capable of ferrying DropShips from one star to the next due to about 95% of their mass being dedicated to their K-F drive alone, WarShips employ special "compact" cores that only weigh up about half as much and thus leave plenty of tonnage free to fill with maneuvering drives, guns, cargo, an organic fighter wing or two, more guns...and they can still carry DropShips with their own weapons and potential fighter assets just the same. (Just don't try to maneuver with the droppers still docked. You don't have magic "inertia dampeners" in this universe, so trying to accelerate at even 1G would basically turn your WarShip into a skyscraper with thousands-of-tons weights hanging from its sides by their docking collars...if your fleet is to go anywhere in-system, the DropShips will have to fly side-by-side with their big brother under their own power.)

One of the sample ships in GURPS: Spaceships is a massive dreadnought that carry 100000 tons of other ships inside, the idea being that it can carry its own escort fleet from place to place.

Jovian Chronicles: The Jovian Godsfire class super carrier and the CEGA Poseidon class Battleship. Somewhat justified that both were originally designed as battleships, but had exo and fighter bays added later on. The Valiant carrier qualifies due to its Wave Motion Gun described below.

Many of the larger Hydran ships also fit the model, as the Hydrans are very fighter-happy and include them on most ships (even their tiny police ship carries fighters and launch tubes to get them out there fast).

Also Space Control Ships, with their battleship level firepower and the ability to launch both fighters and "Fast Patrol Ships" (basically PT boats). One even includes a sensor scout in the mashup to be a SUPER Space Control Ship. Of course, it still only carries a dozen fighters and six P Fs.

Crimson Skies has Zeppelins that carry from 6 to 12 planes and 4 to 6 12-inch naval guns (basically battleship guns from 1900-1912), making them both the Battlestar and an Airborne Aircraft Carrier.

In Twilight Imperium War Suns both pack a lot of firepower and can carry fighters. Though they look like Death Stars. The cruiser unit looks suspiciously like the Trope Namer but can't carry fighters.

Puppet Shows

The Supermarionation show Star Fleet gives a two-step variant: the huge alien mothership launches smaller carriers (looking like skeletal beasts) which then carry imperial fighters under their "ribcage" for deployment in battle.

Video Games

All M1 carrier class ships in the X-Universe games are armed to the teeth, and carry dozens of fighters. They'll still be eaten alive by M2 destroyers (sometimes even by M7 frigates!) if the fighters aren't launched or get gunned down by flak arrays. This is largely because they lack the shielding and laser generator capacity of M2s. But the Split M7 Panther introduced in X3: Terran Conflict is a classic (if miniaturized) battlestar: it carries 32 fighters (much higher than ships of its class) while still being fast and fairly heavily armed.

X Rebirth eschews the traditional ship classification of previous games, but most combat capital ships are battlestars to varying degrees, albeit using Drone Deployers rather than Space Fighters. The ultimate battlestar is the Arawn, a multi-kilometer long carrier, can carry several hundred drones and has mounting points for seventy turrets, several of which are within its cavernous interior. Cheaper, specialized ships like the Taranis eschew some drone carrying capacity in favor of bigger guns.

Carrier Command: Gaea Mission shows a seabourne version, with both sets of MANTA aerial and WALRUS amphibious craft, and flak and plasma cannons (as well as the Hammerhead missile). Notably, it can't entirely hold its own in close combat, needing to deploy WALRUS' in order to counter hostile WALRUS' since its guns can't aim down at the water.

At least a few types of ships in the Halo universe are like this. Most notably, the Covenant assault carrier, a 5.3-kilometer behemoth, as well as the 29km supercarrier revealed in Reach. Most human ships can do both jobs as well - but they are usually called "cruisers" or "frigates", and are tiny in comparison (1,191 and 490 meters, respectively, though actual human carriers are larger at three kilometers.)

In Halo 4, the 5.7-kilometer UNSC Infinity◊ is a fully-fledged Battlestar. Armed to the teeth with four mass drivers, twenty-six thousand missiles and hundreds of fighter escorts, the ship is so big that it could carry ten frigates internally. The Infinity is essentially a small fleet of its own, capable of smashing a Covenant fleet with laughable ease - in one case, quite literally.

And then there is Mantle's Approach, the Didact's personal flagship. At its longest, the Approach is a staggering three hundred seventy-one kilometers, matched only by the Covenant holy city High Charity in scope and grandeur. The Word of God also insists that Mantle's Approach is far and away from being the largest warship in the Forerunner's arsenal. The only thing its missing are the space fighters, but this is compensated for by the fact that the Approach is carrying a Forerunner superweapon and has a minimum crew requirement of one Forerunner to fly the damn thing.

Averted in Homeworld. The Mothership has only a few small point defense weapons, and the later researched Carriers and Battleships are two distinct ships. It was used by the residents of the Garden of Kadesh, with their needle ships being capable of spewing hordes of fighters and firing at least two or more higher end Ion Beams each. This may be why their capital ships are among the only ships in the game you can't capture and incorporate into your own fleet.

There's also the Bentusi Tradeships, whose primary weapons easily outclass those of the Kadeshi Needles. The player faction doesn't see them launch fighters until the semi-sequel, Homeworld: Cataclysm, however.

There's also the Turanic Raiders' carrier. The first time you encounter her she only launches fighters and corvettes and retreats after you finished destroying them, only using her point defense guns if you attack her with your own corvettes. When you meet her again, she attacks the Mothership with two ion cannons, and if you didn't build or capture a few frigates before the battle you're toast.

Homeworld: Cataclysm also features this for the player faction's mothership; it's got six heavy mass drivers that are about equivalent to a heavy cruiser's gun armament, and it later acquires the SiegeCannon. This goes some way towards balancing the fact that you can't manufacture frigates or capital ships until quite late in the campaign compared to the previous instalment.

In Homeworld 2 battlecruisers can't manufacture fighters like Carriers or the Mothership, but they do have facilities where fighters can dock and repair.

Wing Commander had this in several games, including the second game's TCS Concordia, armed with a full carrier wing, the Phase Transit Cannon which would kill other ships in a single shot no matter their size, and eight Antimatter cannons.

Many warships of destroyer size and larger also have integral fighter wings, albeit with rather fewer fighters than dedicated carriers.

Wing Commander IV features super-carriers, the Vesuvius class, absolutely humongous ships (e.g. your base ship, the Intrepid, is absolutely dwarfed by them) designed to carry ten fighter wings, with a large number of point-defense weapons and anti-capship guns (in the novelization), and such tough armor that to destroy one requires flying into the fight deck and trashing its innards. Oh and to add, these behemoths can turn on a dime. There are no super-weapons incorporated in the design... fortunately, since it's used against you.

Although it doesn't start off as such by design, after the TCS Midway acquires the fleet-killing plasma cannonfrom an alien ship in Prophecy, it fits this trope. Too bad that in one later mission, it becomes a one-use-only weapon after it fires the first time, which ends up cruelly subverting the trope. In one "You've lost the game" scenario during the final mission, the Midway fires its cannon in an attempt to destroy the alien fleet warping through a gate, but ends up destroying itself in the process thanks to a power overload.

Pretty much anything Destroyer-class or bigger in the Freespace series comes with a bunch of fighters (it's never specified exactly how many, but pretty much "lots"; probably hundreds) plus beam cannons to take on other enemy warships.

There is a few hints here and there that some of the larger of the smaller-than-Destroyer ship-classes can carry fighters. Considering the Terrans and Vasudans have no ships larger than a Destroyer in the first game, and that Destroyers explicitly can carry several wings of fighters...

The GTVA Colossus is explicitly 12 times the volume of a Shivan Lucifer-class destroyer, (the in-game model is about 3 times the size of the GTD Orion) and carries 240 fighters and bombers in total.

Pointedly avoided in the Wings of Dawn mod, where almost all capital ships are either a carrier that carries a lot of fighters, but not many guns, or a battleship with lots of guns and no fighter bay. The only true battlestars are the Nordera Battleaxe cruiser and the Hertak Armageddon dreadnought.

All ships with fighter complements in the Escape Velocity series have more firepower than other ships their faction has access to. This is probably because fighter bays can be installed on any ship with enough room, and anything big enough to carry much heavy firepower tends to be enormous anyways.

The be-all and end-all of the EV Nova battlestars is the Polaris Raven, a 1.2 km, vaguely butterfly-shaped ship literally built around its Wave Motion Gun and a fighter bay with greater capacity than anything else in the game. For the most part, it's weirdly subverted in Nova since space fighters are fairly useless: at best, you use them as a distraction for the AI and make the kill yourself. The exception is with the Polaris, whose Manta fighter mounts a main gun worthy of a destroyer, making it a credible threat to enemy capital ships in numbers.

The Great Fox from the Star Fox games. Albeit smaller than most examples, but it has the same philosophy; houses a squadron of four fighters, and has some pretty big anti-starship guns.

Every Super Robot Wars game, virtually every mission, has you launching from some battleship or other. They both join in the fray as lumbering, slow (but rather durable) ships of the line, and provide a place for weakened mechs to dock and repair/refuel. The above examples from Gundam and Macross are common, as well as originals such as the Hagane and Shirogane. The Kurogane even has a giant drill on the front to ram things.

W's Valstork goes the extra mile by attaching one of its robot contingent, the Valhawk, to its Wave Motion Gun to amplify its power, and later actually combining with the Valhawk to form the giant ship-robot Valguard.

And then there's the Iron Gear from Xabungle, which in addition to packing an eight-inch gun, can just turn into a hundred-meter-tall robot and step on you.

Played with a little in EVE Online; essentially every ship class is capable of launching and operating unmanned combat or utility drones, whether those ships are frigate-sized asteroid miners or kilometer-long warships packing high-powered beam lasers. But only true carriers (which cannot carry any ballistic, beam, or missile weaponry) can launch manned fighters, which are significantly more powerful than the unmanned drones and can be sent off to escort other players whilst carriers sit far away from trouble. Carriers can still mount some pretty formidable defenses, though, and their ability to repair and restore the shields of other ships can make them a fairly significant passive threat even without their fighters in play.

Then there's the Mothership/Supercarrier and the even bigger Titan. They can carry players.

Supercarriers had their ability to carry clone vats dropped and titans had their ability to carry drones dropped as well. The Titan could still be considered this trope taken to logical extremes.

In the Naval Ops series, there is a class of ship called the Battlecarrier. It can mount a moderate number of battleship-class guns and has a flight deck to allow a likewise moderate amount of planes (or ducks) to be deployed in battle.

These ships are based off the converted Ise-class battleships; desperately short of carriers, the IJN converted Ise and Hyuga into battlecarriers. Battlecarriers ingame are a lot more successful than their real life counterparts ever were (see Real Life for further details), but are outmatched by properly outfitted battleships, in part because aircraft in the Naval Ops series aren't as powerful as their real life counterparts.

Averted by default in O-Game. Small fighters do exist but they are implied to fly alongside all the others ships in an attack fleet rather than in carriers which raises serious logistical questions.

In the Star Control series, the Ur-Quan Dreadnought can launch swarms of fighters to pick apart any ships its main gun can't obliterate. It's obviously meant to look almost exactly like the original Battlestar Galactica... well, if it were green, and crewed by Scary Dogmatic Aliens who are the antagonists rather than the heroes.

To a lesser extent, the Orz Nemesis (with its Space Marines) and Chenjesu Broodhome (with remote-controlled drones) also qualify.

In Sins of a Solar Empire, as capital ships level up, they gain the ability to house squadrons of fighters or bombers. Even the capital ships labeled as "carriers" still have enough firepower to, at least, fight off frigates and cruisers, although another capital ship will outgun it. The AdventHalcyon-class carriers are armed with powerful beam weapons, allowing them to Beam Spam on par with the other Advent ships.

Averted with the cruiser-type escort carriers, which have no weapons beyond their ability to construct and launch 1-3 wings of fighters or bombers.

There are no true fighters or bombers, only assault shuttles, planetary bombers, and unmanned Attack Drones. Most of these are riders mounted outside the ship rather than launched from an internal hangar or bay.

Destroyer or cruiser carriers lack the firepower to be true line combatants. The closest are dreadnought carriers. The Morrigi (who else) flagship exemplifies this trope.

One twist comes from the Morrigi, who mount drones on more ship types than other races that need special drone carrier sections.

Another comes from the Tarka, whose admittedly late-game Hunter Battle Riders are cruiser-sized - normal riders are dwarfed by destroyers - with the attendant firepower that implies.

Sequel Escalation is in effect for the sequel, where all the races have destroyer-sized riders inspired by Traveller, while the Liir-Zuul alliance has gone up to dreadnought riders on Leviathans. Also, with Kingfisher modules, all dreadnoughts can carry some riders, though the dedicated carriers naturally do better.

Dreadnoughts, kilometer-long behemoths with an 800 meter long mass accelerator capable of taking down the shields (it spam projectiles hitting with nuke-level force) of any ship in Citadel space.

As revealed in Mass Effect 3, any ship can be classified as a dreadnought if it's fitted with powerful enough guns. Outfitting all civilian ships (including 3 massive liveships used for all food production) with the powerful Thanix cannons counts, although the quarians claim otherwise, because they'd be in violation of Citadel law if they had that many dreadnoughts.

Carriers, similar in size to Dreadnoughts but armed only with fighters. Similar to modern aircraft carriers (a well-placed shot in the hangar will gut the carriers, and general strategy is to defend them at all costs). An entirely human innovation and one of many examples of Humans Are Special. Because Carrier construction is not limited by the Treaty of Farixen (see the Washington Naval Treaty), the human Systems Alliancebuilds as many of them as it can. In this case it's more of "only Humanity Is Insane enough to Zerg Rush a ship with anti-fighter lasers to a point were they overheat allowing heavy bombers to come in".

Cruisers, mid-size ships that also carry a small number of fighters. They lack a dedicated hangar and therefore fit them into the spaces between layers of armor. This is the closest the Mass Effect has to the Battlestar, athough the in-game codex call them "The poor bloody infantry" of space warfare...

Frigates, which carry no fighters and instead operate in "wolf-pack" flotillas.

The Reapers themselves are classified as "dreadnoughts", and are absolute monsters in space combat... or ground combat, for that matter. Each of them also carries a swarm of Oculus drones for anti-fighter defenses as well, technically making them a battlestar.

In the Star Wars game Empire at War, this is The Empire's hat: Any Imperial ship bigger than a corvette has several free fighter compliments. The logical conclusion is the Executor, from the expansion, which can launch a squadron every few seconds, on top of being the biggest ship in the game.

The Behemoth-class battlecruisers in StarCraft in Expanded Universe act as carriers for Wraith-class fighters, dropships, and other small craft. This is not, however, shown in the game, probably because the game unit scaling is way off, showing the fighters to be a third of the size of the battlecruisers.

In the campaign of Starcraft II Raynor's Raiders use a battlecruiser as their base of operations, it's shown to have at least one hangar that fits nearly every other unit in the game and is apparently where the mobile starting structures for each mission deploy from.

In one mission of "Heart of the Swarm" the Hyperion is capable of launching "tac fighters" to help deal with swarms of enemies too numerous for just the main guns.

Protoss carriers are also shown to have formidable weapons in Expanded Universe and the intro of the original game. Not so much in the game. A fan-made video shows the Ganthritor (Tassadar's flagship) One-Hit Kill several Behemoth-class battlecruisers withotu even launching its interceptors.

Star Patrol in Tachyon: The Fringe have cruisers which appear to combine the characteristics of several different classes: speed/maneuverability of a frigate, firepower of a cruiser, and fighter-carrying capability of a carrier. Unfortunately, their capabilities are never shown in the game, which is focused on fighter combat.

The Durandal of the Xenosaga trilogy, a 4,000m-long penis extension sword-shaped battleship belonging to the Kukai Foundation. It possesses advanced weaponry that outstrips even the Federation's special forces and is regularly seen kicking the crap out of fleets of enemy ships. It made its debut in Episode I by ramming an enemy vessel, for crying out loud. It serves as home base for the protagonists for much of the series until its absorbed by the Eldritch Abomination Abel's Ark and is turned into a twisted and grisly Nightmare Fuel-providing wreck.

Star Trek Online has two carriers for the Klingon side - the Vo'Quv and the Kar'fi; both are battle-stars as the Vo'Quv carries 6 guns, and the Kar'fi 7. The main 'battleship' types in the game carry 8, so they aren't far behind at all, and the Vo'Quv is exceptionally tough. As the updates have passed, more carriers have been added — all of which can carry some guns.

Infinite Space has several classes of battleship that have catapults and so can be equipped with fighters. Some cruisers have them as well, but equipping them with fighters is usually less efficient as they have less space to spare.

All battleships in Freelancer are implied to be Battlestars (at the very least, you can land on them, and I think other fighters do as well). However, fighters are so independent in the game (capable of their own hyperjumps, and often seen prowling on their own all over the Sirius sector) that it's more likely that a battleship is supposed to be escorted into battle by fighters, rather than launch fighters upon entering battle, therefore staying on the very edge of this trope.

The fighters also tend to be incredibly overpowered compared to capital ships. During the campaign, there are plenty of missions where you have to take out cruisers and battleships almost all by yourself. Better hope you packed your torpedo launcher this morning.

The largest ships in the Space Empires games are baseships, quite literally moving starbases. Being so spacious, they can accommodate lots of fighters as well as standard ship weaponry.

If you've researched or otherwise acquired fighters in Master of Orion, you can put them on just about any ship. Since fighters can take quite some time to get to their targets and can be shot down on the way, Battlestars may be more viable than true carriers.

In Star Ruler you can tack ship bays together with guns on any spacecraft you design, as well as construction bays to add Mobile Factory ability if you wish. However, since capacity scales with ship size, you will only get useful strikecraft complements with big capships. It helps to use Quantum Compressors to make Clown Cars. Then you get into ever-larger supercapital craft that use capitals for parasite complements...Behold. The famous Galactic Armory mod adds two hulls meant for this; the Carrier Hull, like the name suggests, leans more to normal carriers in being relatively thin-skinned and trades some space away for having strikecraft bays integrated right into the hull, while the Mothership Hull is closer to a Battlestar, trading out some space and not having the option of extra ship bays in order to accommodate more weapons and stuff.

Averted for the players in Battlestar Galactica Online. Escorts and Lines are pure combatants while Carriers have no business being at the front.

Strange Adventures In Infinite Space and its sequel have several alien races with carriers, although not all could classify as Battlestars. The Garthan have Light Carriers that periodically launch fighters but are only armed with a pair of fairly weak missile launchers - definitely not suited for close combat. The Urluquai have much heavier carriers that not only launch fighters but can also hold their own with their powerful beam cannons (they're also cloaked until they're right on top of you). The Ravians also have such ships.

The Starlancer-verse doesn't even have battleships, carriers are the biggest badasses in the fleet with the most weapons and shields. The next ship in line, the cruisers, are just mini-carriers that have less weapons and still carry fighters.

The strategy portion of Mission Critical has capital ships that have 2 types of weapons: anti-ship missiles and Point Defenseless lasers. Main combat is done by Attack Drones, which intercept enemy missiles and are too fast and maneuverable for the PD lasers to track. Until the events of the game, the UN has been dominating the war thanks to their better drones (humans are too slow to match them). That is why The Alliance has developed Hype, a mix of drugs and nanotech that temporarily boosts the brain's processing power to allow a human to control drones, allowing the Alliance to win despite the enemy's superiority.

The Bengal-class carrier in Star Citizen. To give you an idea of the Beam Spam involved, Roberts Space Industries had to reduce the number of guns firing by over half, or else the battle in the promo video would have been over in seconds.

Ships like the Idris-class corvette and destroyers have hangar space for a small number of fighters, but primarily rely on their guns for their offensive punch.

The aircraft carrier from Advance Wars: Dual Strike could carry two air units and had a formidable arsenal of anti-aircraft missiles (as well as the longest reach of any indirect attacker). In Days of Ruin/Dark Conflict, the carrier was reworked, replacing the menacing missile battery with a weaker close-range anti-aircraft gun, but also giving it the ability to resupply and repair air units as well as build a short range multi-role plane. Cruisers have extended into quasi-Battlestar status: initially they were an anti-submarine, anti-aircraft ship capable of transporting two helicopters, but as of Dual Strike gained the ability to attack other naval units as well.

The Sunrider is not only armed with Trinity lasers, missile launchers, and a pair of powerful kinetic cannon turrets, it also contains a hangar bay for "Ryder" Mecha.

Warcraft III has a biological example with the Crypt Lord, an enormous, heavily armored zombie spider-beetle-mantis... thing, that can release locusts from its body to attack nearby enemies, make mooks from nearby corpses, and even has an equivalent of a Wave Motion Gun with its Impale spell, which damages and stuns enemies in a line.

Web Comics

Battlestars show up on practically all major sides in Schlock Mercenary — with the advent of advanced gravity control and AI present in the series, capital ship battles appear to be decided by who is able to project the most force in as many different ways as possible, with one-trick ponies giving way to ships that can do many things at the same time. The second ship of the protagonists is a decommissioned Tausennigan Thunderhead Superfortress named the "Post-Dated Check Loan", which fits the trope. Later we get introduced to the Human Battleplates, which are equally well-fitting. The Battleplate "Morokweng" is so big that its interior looks like a minor city: It can hold and launch not just one-man fighters, but starships with hundreds if not thousands of crew.

The (probable) crowning example would be the so-far only seen Tausennigan "plate-class" ships, which includes the species (apparent) flagship "Cloak of Untrammelled Dignity". At little over one thousand kilometres in length and a total size of five hundred thousand cubic kilometres, it is roughly about five thousand times larger than the "Morokweng" (assuming the "Morokweng" was about twice the size of the "Tunguska", one of the oldest and smallest battleplates at a 'mere' 32 cubic kilometres in size).

The eponymously named "Moonhawk" in Starship Moonhawk is a prime example of both a Battlestar and a Wave Motion Gun. However, the latter has (thus far) only appeared in bonus art.

From Exo Squad we have the Resolute and Resolute II which are cool starships. They double as Exo-Frame Carriers and both carried huge guns into battle, making them Battlestars.

Real Life

The Ise-class battleshipsIse and Hyuga were converted into hybrid battleship-carriers (航空戦艦, Kōkū Senkan (Aviation Battleship), USN Classification: BBV) during World War Two, removing two of their rear turrets in exchange for small flight decks and a capacity of 22 seaplanes and divebombers. The small size of the flight deck meant that their utility as carriers are comparable to that of an escort carrier at best, and due to the lack of both planes and flight crews, their operational use ended up rather unsuccessful, to the point where the ships continued to be employed as pure battleships right up until their career as warships effectively ended during the Battle off Cape Engaņo, where they as part of the pitiful remnants of Japanese aircraft carrier forces were overwhelmed by swarms of American fighter-bombers, and suffered the indignity of being reduced to floating anti-aircraft batteries for the remainder of their lives. In retrospect, their seaplanes would have been useful as scouts and anti-submarine patrols (both of which the Japanese desperately needed in face of US Navy's superior radar technology and extensive use of submarines), scenarios where the battleships' guns and airplanes would be out of each others' ways to begin with. But then again, by the time the battleship-carriers came on-line, Japan already had trouble building enough of any plane.

Earlier aircraft carriers did approach a "cruiserstar" configuration - American carriers Lexington and Saratoga and the Japanese carriers Akagi and Kaga were all fitted with heavy cruiser-caliber big guns and could theoretically fight on equal terms with anything smaller than a battleship or battlecruiser. In reality, the guns were often positioned where they were either of little use or actually detrimental to their aviation facilities (firing the cruiser guns to the port side by Lexington or Saratoga would have ruined their respective flight decks), and the huge, unarmored flight decks made them vulnerable in a gun fight. The Japanese ships went down without any enemy ship getting anywhere the big guns could hit, while their American counterparts had their big guns removed and replaced with far more useful anti-aircraft or dual-purpose weapons).

It is worth noting that defensive armament on late-war aircraft carriers such as the American Essex class would include a battery of 5 inch guns in so-called "Dual Purpose" mounts - designed to engage either attacking aircraft or any smaller enemy ships that got inside their fighter screen. This is, however, more of a result of unified logistics (the Dual Purpose mounts in question are standardized on all new-constructions and extensive reconstructions of frontline warships in the US) than anything else. In practice, it was almost impossible for enemy surface combatants to get close enough to engage an aircraft carrier, due to their combination of being very fast and having dozens of planes on board to spot enemy ships miles away, making these guns' anti-ship capability merely academic in nature. Dual purpose mounts were used against surface ships in only one engagement: the Battle off Samar, and only because the escort carriers of Taffy 3 were unable to outrun the Center Force.

The British warship HMS Furious also went through a rather impractical phase with a launching deck at the front and a battleship-grade gun at the back, before being eventually fully converted to a flush-deck aircraft carrier that would actually be useful for aircraft operations. Despite her armament, she was very lightly armoured. Along with her sister ships, HMS Glorious and HMS Courageous which also underwent numerous major refits, their designs were not considered a success and earned them the nicknames Curious, Spurious and Outrageous.

Also from the IJN, the I-400 class submarine aircraft carrier. Well armed for a submarine with torpedos and a deck gun, it also carried a full squadron of three float planes. Given the late nature of the war, it was speculated they will instead execute Kamikaze attack, making it closer to a modern ballistic missile submarine.

The Admiral Kuznetsov is known for being built with a dramatically different approach in mind compared to US aircraft carriers. Unlike these, it carries primary offensive armament in form of ship-to-ship missiles and the fighters it has on board serve defensive rather than power projection purposes. Although it carries a very Cool Plane (the Sukhoi [Su]-33), the ski ramp used for takeoffs seriously limits the loads that they can carry (a trade-off for being less expensive to build and operate than steam catapults), leaving the aircraft limited to air defense rather than offense. However, the design has proved Awesome but Impractical in the post-Cold War environment (as Russia, like the US, finds herself in conflicts against countries with no capability nor desire for sea control), and the ship is slated for a refit in which its anti-ship missile launchers will be replaced with a larger hangar to carry more aircraft (mirroring the alterations China made in completing the Kuznetsov's sister ship Varyag as the Liaoning), while the Sukhois will be swapped for the lighter MiG-29Ks. It will likely keep its full load of anti-aircraft missiles, though, so it probably will retain its "battlestar" status.

Also worthy of mention are their smaller and less capable predecessors, the Kiev class carriers. These had a pretty powerful missile armament themselves, and operated an air wing of helicopters and V/STOL aircraft. Their missiles made them pretty scary to look at but the very troublesome Yak-38 fighters curtailed their effectiveness as a carrier. Those were supposed to be replaced by the significantly more capable Yak-141, but only two protoypes were ever built before the Soviet Union ceased to exist and funding collapsed. The last of the Kievs, the Admiral Gorshkov, was built with Even More Dakka than the first three ships, but has since been stripped of its "battlestar" status after being sold to India as the INS Vikramaditya and converted into a full-length aircraft carrier with only short-range defensive armament.

During the Cold War, there were suggestions to convert the Iowa-class battleships into hybrid battleship carriers like the Ise and Hyuga above; the conversion concept called for removal of the aft 16-inch turret and installing a ski jump and hangar facilities to support Harrier jump jets. Cost and practicality issues (among other things, the resulting ship would've been rather topheavy, to the point that capsizing in heavy seas would be a legitimate danger) meant that the concept never gained serious traction within the US Navy.

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